For Young Investors With At Least $50,000, Snapchat Usage Almost Ties Facebook

Facebook and Snapchat enjoy almost equivalent usage statistics among those investors 18 to 29-years-old, with 73% and 69% of this demographic (respectively) using each site once a day or more, according to a new poll.

A woman wears 'Snapchat Spectacles' on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on March 2, 2017. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Thursday’s IPO for Snap Inc., the parent company for the popular social media app Snapchat, received much attention. By the end its first day of trading, Snap Inc. stock was up 44% giving the company a market capitalization of about $33 billion. What’s interesting is that 64% of potential investors said they did not have a Snapchat account, according to a new Morning Consult poll. Not surprisingly then, 63% of investors said they did not plan to buy Snap Inc. stock. However, 35% said they thought Snap would be a good investment, and presumably many of those are part of the 36% of investors who are Snapchat users.

Looking at these results, I was interested in this subset of “investors,” which the poll described as: “1,074 adults with at least $50,000 in total investments.” For a retiree, $50,000 in total investments may not seem like much money. However, for an 18 to 29-year-old, that is quite a bit to have saved for investing by such a young age.

So, I asked myself:what percentage, by age-range, use these social media sites regularly?

Data from Morning Consult poll, Feb. 16-23, 2017

(For the percentages above, "regularly" is defined as those who use the app/site either "about once a day" or "several times a day," which were both contained in the Morning Consult data)

What’s clear is that Facebook (which also owns Instagram) remains dominant in regular use among investors in all age ranges. The result that really stuck out to me was comparing Snapchat to Facebook at each age extreme. For people age 65+, Facebook enjoys a very high usage rate (60%) among investors. In contrast, almost none of those age 65+ investors use Snapchat (1%).

On the other end of the age spectrum, Facebook and Snapchat enjoy usage statistics almost equivalent among those investors in the 18 to 29-year-old range, with 73% and 69% respectively. While we have heard for some time now aboutSnapchat’s popularity among young Americans, it’s also popular among young adults with quite a bit of financial means for their age (at least $50,000 in investments before age 30). While only 116 of all investors polled fell into this 18 to 29-year-old age range, it is certainly interesting to learn more about how this rare group uses social media.